Understanding Corruption in Chinese Characters (part 2)

Looking at the Etymologies of 黑, 粦, 無, and 舞

Note: Before we get started here, I’d like to mention our motivation for making posts like these. It is not to show how we explain characters in our dictionary, or to say that learners need to understand character corruption on a deep level in order to learn characters. In the dictionary, explanations will be much shorter and more concise. But hey! This is a blog! Here we’d like to have a little fun and show how paleography really works to people who normally wouldn’t get the chance. This can be difficult stuff (it’s a graduate-level class in Taiwan, after all!), so please ask us if anything is unclear. We love talking about this stuff! We’re here to help. Get ready for a wild ride. Here are some of the main ingredients for this post: tattooing people’s faces, bloody battlefields with rotting corpses, ghost fire and rain dances!

In the previous post in this series, the notion of corruption was introduced as well as the two main reasons it occurs: 1. the process of writing itself and 2. the misunderstanding of a character’s structure (杜忠誥 2002:32)1. Now, we’ll start looking at some of the types of corruption that occur. Specifically, we’ll be looking at the first of the eight types of corruption identified by Prof. Tu Chung-kao [杜忠誥] via exploring the etymologies of some common characters.

Type 1 Corruption: Disintegration [離析 Líxī]

Corruption by way of Disintegration is defined as a character form or the form of one of its components that was originally a single piece being broken into two pieces (2002:53)2. Let’s take a look at the etymologies of 黑 & 粦 to get a better understanding of what this means.

Example 1: 黑 hēi “black”

Above are two early forms of 黑. (1a) is from Shang dynasty (1700 to 1100 BCE) oracle bone inscriptions [甲骨文 Jiǎgǔwén], while (1b) is from the early Zhou dynasty3 (1059 to 255 BCE). (1a) and (1b) are pictures of the front view of a person whose face had been tattooed as punishment4 [墨刑 mòxíng] for committing a crime (2002:54)5. The body is the same form as 大 dà(a picture of an adult person from the front), with the head exaggerated. According to Chinese History: A New Manual by Endymion Wilkinson6, this was one of the "five punishments [五刑 wǔxíng]"7. A person receiving 墨刑 had the name of their crime tattooed on their body. If the tattoo was on the face, as it is here with 黑, it was called qíngmiàn [黥面]. Forms from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods sometimes added dots, such as can be seen in (1c) and (1d)8 below (note that in pre-Han dynasty scripts, character change and variation was extremely common and also varied by geographic area):

According to Prof. Tu, the addition of dots here was to reinforce the notion of being marked by the 墨刑 tattoo (2002:55).

The bottom of 黑 as stated above was originally 大. During the Eastern Zhou, 大 became more stylized and was written as follows9:

Forms (1e) to (1h) are very typical ways of writing 大 during Warring States; and as can be clearly seen, 大 has already broken into two parts. Forms (1e) and (1g) are still *almost* a single piece, while forms (1f) and (1h) show a significant amount of separation. What caused this change?

Form (1i) is already very close to modern Chinese. (1k) is the typical Warring States form similar to forms (1e) to (1h) above. (1j) is a superimposition of (1i) in red, onto (1k) in black, showing that these forms are still essentially the same. The most likely cause for this change is convenience and ease of writing. Though (1k) has one more stroke, it’s actually easier to write and can be written in a more fluid motion (because the way the brush is lifted between strokes is less laborious). At the same time, we can also see how forms can get broken into smaller pieces.

The addition of the extra dots as seen in the forms , combined with writing 大 in two separate parts, like above, caused the bottom of 黑 to look very similar to 炎 yán “the top of a burning flame”. This is readily seen in (1l), which is the form that appears in the Shuōwén [《說文》].

In forms (1m) and (1n), the top 火 huǒ “fire” gets straightened out, while the bottom retains its huǒ-ness. In (1n), the top parts looks like 里, while the bottom looks like a taller version of 灬, the form that 火 huǒ takes in modern characters when it appears at the bottom of a character. (1o) looks mostly like the modern form. Had 黑’s form not become corrupted, it would probably look like now. The original form , a single “piece” being corrupted into , which has multiple parts, is an example of corruption by way of Disintegration.

So, 黑 originally depicted a person with a tattooed face. Dots were added to emphasize the tattoo. The dots, along with the person’s body, separated over time and corrupted into 炎. The top 火 “straightened out” and combined with the face to resemble 里, while the bottom 火 became 灬. Thus, the 灬 in the modern form is simply a corruption of an earlier form, and actually has nothing to do with fire.

And if you’re wondering how we boil this information down in our dictionary, here’s a screen shot:

Example 2: 粦 lín “friar’s lantern, ignis fatuus, jack-o’-lantern”

Another example of corruption by way of disintegration is 粦, which is phonetic in characters such as 鄰 lín “neighbor”, 憐 lián “pitiful” and 麟 lín “(Chinese) unicorn”. If you aren’t familiar with any of those terms given as the definition above (I wasn’t), Dictionary.com gives this definition: “A pale flame or phosphorescence sometimes seen over marshy ground at night. It is believed to be due to the spontaneous combustion of methane or other hydrocarbons originating from decomposing organic matter.” In Chinese this type of fire is called 燐火 línhuǒ (in Simplified: 磷火) or 鬼火 guǐhuǒ.

The earliest form for 粦 is the oracle bone [甲骨文] form (2a) and the bronze inscription [金文 jīnwén] (2b). This is a picture of a person represented by 大 dà, with dots (or small lines) above and below each arm. Notice the difference at the bottom. Form (2a) doesn’t have the feet explicitly drawn, while (2b) does.

Side note: Getting off on the right foot:

An interesting thing about the feet is, in the oracle bone and bronze inscription scripts, there are many characters which have variants that have feet, but the meaning expressed is the same whether the feet are there or not. We know this because of the meaning they are used to express in a given context. A good example is 無 wú “not, none” & 舞 wǔ “dance”.

無 is the original form of 舞. Its earliest forms (2c) and (2d)10 are pictures of a person doing a rain dance, holding either ox tails or bird feathers as ornaments (季旭昇 2004:470)11. It originally meant “rain dance” and later came to mean just dancing in general. It wasn’t until after the Western Zhou dynasty that 無 was borrowed by way of sound loan to mean “not, none” (2004:493). The meaning “dance” was then represented by adding feet [舛] to the 無 form, producing 舞, as seen below in (2e):

So, these two variant forms (at one time or another) both represented the meaning “rain dance” or “dance”, as such it can be seen that the addition of feet didn’t affect the meaning.

A quick detour en route back to the dots:

As to the explanation for the dots (or little lines), first we must take a rather gruesome detour. Rotting corpses produce phosphine gas. According to Wikipedia: “Phosphine gas is more dense than air and hence may collect in low-lying areas. It can form explosive mixtures with air and also self-ignite.” The Shuōwén definition for 㷠 (粦) is “㷠 (粦) is the blood of dead soldiers as well as that of their cows and horses. 㷠 is ghost fire.”12 So, basically, the rotting corpses of soldiers, cows and horses on a battlefield release phosphine gas and under hot conditions, the phospine gas may self-ignite. When it does, it gives off a green colored flame, hence the name 鬼火 or ghost fire.

Now back to the dots (for real):

Returning to the explanation for the dots, Shirakawa Shizuka [白川静] believes the dots to represent blood13, while Chi Hsiu-Sheng [季旭昇] sees them to be the actual flames of the ghost fire. In the images below, you can see that dots have been used to represent both fire (火 huǒ) and blood (血 xiě):

From a character form analysis perspective, both explanations are reasonable, since each has a precedent. However, from a meaning perspective, the fire explanation has the upper hand because it is a more direct explanation that is tied directly into the original meaning, basically “pale green flame”. Blood is also related in the sense of the role it plays in gruesome, bloody battlefields, which are one of the places where the “ghost fire” appears, but its role is indirect, whereas the fire explanation is direct. As such, the dots representing fire is the better explanation.

In the form that appears in the Shuōwén, the top part has already been corrupted into 炎 yán “flame” by roughly the same process that corrupted the bottom of 黑 into 炎. The fact that the meaning of 㷠 has to do with fire most likely also played a role (even though flames don’t usually have feet).

Forms (2h) - (2k) are Han dynasty forms of 隣 & 鄰 – variant forms, both pronounced lín (杜忠誥 2002:67). Interestingly, the left half of (2h) is still very close to the original form (2b) above. The left half of (2i) is close to the version that appears in the Shuōwén, while the top of the right half of (2j) has been corrupted into 土 tǔ with dots above it. The (2k) form is basically the same as the modern form: the top part has been corrupted into 米 [mǐ rice], while the feet [舛] on the bottom are still intact.

So, to recap, the original form (on the left above) was a single, unified form. By the time of the Shuōwén (middle form), it has already been broken into several pieces and the modern form (on the right) remains in separate pieces, with the further corruption of 炎 into 米. So, what was originally a picture of a person on fire became corrupted into a flame with feet, then into uncooked rice with feet! In Outlier terms, 米 is a substitute form (i.e., doesn’t give a sound or meaning. It’s like a placeholder for an older form) for the original form of a burning body.

In a future corruption post, we’ll discuss the 2nd type of corruption: Corruption by way of Connection, where we’ll visit the etymologies for 折 & 制.

My definition here is a more general version of Tu Chung-kao’s definition. His original definition: 凡商、周以來一脈相承的古篆文字，其形體或部件，本當連合為一體的，在《說文》篆文中，則離析或斷裂為二，因而導致字形與原義之乖離者，是為「離析之訛」。And my (quite literal) translation: If any character or component forms for any ancient Seal characters since the Shang and Zhou dynasties, derived from the same origin, that used to form a single unit, but within the Seal character forms in the Shuōwén have disintegrated or broken into two, and consequently cause the character form and its original meaning to become separated, this is Corruption by Way of Disintegration (2002: 53). ↩

Images taken from 季旭昇2004年《說文新證‧下冊》，藝文印書館印行，第113頁。 季旭昇 labels them as 1 and 2. ↩